


Sabine

by scapegrace74



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-16 17:24:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19322737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scapegrace74/pseuds/scapegrace74
Summary: This is my gift to CodenamePegasus (@Twitter) for the @xfilesfanficexchange.   They made the very rash decision to give me carte blanche for my fic, and this is what I came up with.  The Sixth Extinction: Amor Fati post-ep/AU.  Mulder's past catches up with him.  Angst with a whipped topping of MSR.  Rated G.





	Sabine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CodeName Pegasus](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=CodeName+Pegasus).



1\. His lips tingle with the sensory echo of Scully’s fingertips, and the door closes softly behind her. It isn’t lost on Mulder that he has just effectively exchanged vows beneath the ersatz chuppah of his doorframe with the woman bringing him news of his ex-wife’s death. It makes a kind of twisted sense in its morbid symmetry.

He is moved, not so much by the words of devotion they exchanged, but by her tears. Scully is neither maudlin nor overwrought, but she wept for him, for the loss of another piece of his past. He’s a selfish man. He’ll continue to water the arid garden of his life with every drop she sheds on his behalf.

Sighing, he moves to the phone, knowing what needs to be done. There’s no need to look up the number.

“Hello, Mrs. Fowley. It’s Fox Mulder.” He takes off his Yankee’s cap and places it gently beside the receiver, no longer in the mood for celebration.

“Yes, it has been a while. I just heard about Diana - I’m deeply sorry for your loss.” The fishtank throws murky light, shadows ribboning languidly against the wall.

“Mrs. Fowley, I need to talk to her.”

2\. The office lays under an oppressive hush, with the shuffling of paper and the scritch of Scully’s pen the only relief from awkward silence. It has been like this for several days, and she burns with the need to understand why. Granted, Mulder is still recovering from his involuntary brain surgery and the loss of Diana, but normally the kind of information she brought back from Africa would lift her partner out of any dark place. Instead, he seems… indifferent, maybe even slightly robotic. Shortly after 5 o’clock each afternoon, just as the light from the clerestory windows is growing dim, he rises, politely bids her goodnight, and leaves without a backwards glance. 

Parking on Hegal Place is notoriously scarce, so she is sitting in her car down the block from Mulder’s apartment, trying to formulate a plan of action. For someone so verbose and extravagantly perceptive, Mulder is surprisingly reticent with self-disclosure. Even after six years, she still has to intuit the cause of his moods from circumstantial evidence, but that method is failing her now.

Before she can decide her next move, she sees him leaving his building, carrying a dark umbrella against the chill rain that has begun to fall. He approaches a parked car and bends towards the passenger window, obviously speaking with whomever is within. He straightens as the door swings open and a petite woman with long dark hair emerges. Is this what he looks like next to her - towering and solicitous? He carefully shelters the woman, one long arm hovering carefully near her shoulders. Scully stares at her lap until they have disappeared inside, unwilling to see what can’t be unseen. Her heart feels bruised. She drives home.

3\. The drumbeat of heels animates the sterile basement corridor, and he rushes to finish his call.

“I’ve got to get back to work, okay sweetie? I’ll see you tonight. Uh-huh, to the stars, you know that. G’bye.”

He can tell she’s overheard at least part of his conversation by the tight mask of composure she wears as she settles deliberately into her chair, focus strained towards her monitor. Several minutes pass with only the staccato sound of her typing. He waits to see if she’ll ask. He wants her to ask, because it will spare him the obligation of divulging. He wants her to ask, because he wants her to feel that she possesses certain inalienable rights where he is concerned: to question the questioner, to test the tensile strength of the fascia that binds them.

Her eyes brim ocean-water that she refuses to blink away. In a war of emotional attrition, he knows he doesn’t stand a chance. He could lay siege to her heart and still go home empty-handed. Scully isn't about mastery. He's learned this the hard way. 

“Scully, there’s… I need you to meet someone. Someone important to me. Can you come over to my place today after work?” She is shaking her head before he’s finished, chin lifted with resolute dignity.

“Scully… please?”

Her shoulders slump in defeat.

4\. Mulder’s hallway has never seemed so long, not even after she’d announced her intention to leave the FBI, to leave him alone with the endless futility of his one-man crusade. As then, her heart beats with leaden precision high in her throat. What’s about to happen will change everything between them, and unlike the previous year she has no back-up plan. She’s placed all her bets on an outside chance, and now the house is folding.

Mulder is still dressed for work, his tie loose and jacket discarded somewhere. His apartment, which usually envelopes her like a worn sweater, feels foreign. She smells spaghetti sauce, and his television emits a quiet laugh-track in the background. It’s a domestic scene, but for once she stands outside the frame, a trespasser in someone else’s narrative.

Her partner is uneasy, that much is clear. His hair is in disarray, and as she watches he shifts from one foot to another. A familiar light of determined resolution settles on him, and he takes her cold hand with his own, drawing her forward towards her fate.

“Come inside, Scully.” She trails behind him towards his couch, where a pair of slight, pale shoulders divided by glossy brown curls can just be made out.

“Mulder, I don’t think…”, she balks. 

“Scully, I want… let me…” he blows air past lips pursed in vexation. In this moment, his eloquence fails him. They are finally standing beside the couch, and as she gasps, Mulder finds words.

“This is Sabine. My daughter.”

5\. Back in 1989 when he first learned that Diana, his on-again-off-again girlfriend, was pregnant, his first reaction had been to offer to pay for an abortion. His second had been to call the family lawyer. For a man obsessed with rebuilding his family from the ashes of his sister’s disappearance, he was resistant in the extreme to potential fatherhood.

Diana thought she could have it all: a demanding career, an evasive but passionate lover, and an all-American family. And for a time, she did, or a credible facsimile. He came around to the idea of becoming a parent slowly under Diana's careful manipulation. She slipped a blurry ultrasound picture into his briefcase, and he spent the better part of a flight to Atlanta looking for meaning in its abstract ovoids. At the second ultrasound, he was sitting beside the technician, listening to the rapid pulse of his redemption. By the time Sabine was born, they were married.

It lasted a little over a year. He never managed to forgive Diana (and by extension, Sabine) for luring his attention away from his newfound paranormal suitor. Shortly after he witnessed Sabine’s first steps across a slopping meadow in Rock Creek Park, they left for Europe. The divorce papers claimed spousal neglect, and he could hardly disagree. He signed over custody, paid enough child support that Diana’s mother quit her job and moved to Germany to become Sabine’s full-time caregiver, and witnessed their baby grow into a striking young girl via semi-annual photographs and an occasional phone call.

Now, here she sat - a long-limbed ten year old with Samantha’s hair, his indolent gaze, and her mother’s patrician cheekbones. A virtual stranger. An orphan. Another chance to prove that he was a worthy custodian of fragile things.

6\. Scully’s first reaction should have been shock, or at least relief. It wasn’t. It was a conflagration of burning jealousy. At Diana, for being a mother and a wife. At Mulder, for welcoming his daughter into their nation of two. And at Sabine - lovely, blameless Sabine - for having a claim on her partner that she could never equal.

Their first meetings were stilted and short. Sabine barely recognized her father when he showed up at her grandmother’s the day after Diana’s funeral. She called him "Mr. Mulder" and he felt two feet tall. They are slowly piecing together a relationship, a few hours at a time.

Since that first introduction, Mulder has tried to include Scully in as many of their plans as possible. By his own admission, he knows next to nothing about adolescent girls, and he is obviously hoping his partner will serve as some kind of female buffer to his ineptitude. They’ve rented bikes and ridden through fallen leaves around the Tidal Basin. They’ve taken in the tigers and elephants at the National Zoo. With the weather turning cold, there are pizzas and candy and the entire Disney collection on VHS.

After a weekend visit to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, they drop an exhausted Sabine off with her grandmother past nightfall. Christmas is the following week, and the street is alight with green and red bulbs. Mulder’s hand is moving to the ignition when she stills it with her own.

“What’s up, Scully?”

“Mulder, I’m thinking of asking for a transfer.” The words are out before she even realizes what she is going to say. He gapes at her, mute.

“Your priorities have shifted. You aren’t going to want to chase the truth with the same zeal, and I completely understand. Sabine needs you. But it’s not… I still have answers I need to find, and if we can’t look for them together, then maybe I should…”

“Scully, stop. Please. Did I give you the impression I was abandoning you? God, I could never…” He shakes his head with so much certainty, she begins to doubt her resolve.

“But, Mulder, you have other obligations now and…”

“The world could be ending tomorrow, Scully, and you’d still be my first priority. Yes, Sabine needs me. Yes, I’ve taken my foot off the gas at work, and if that’s left you feeling forsaken, then I’m truly sorry. But nothing, not the truth, not Sabine, none of it means anything without you. I thought you knew that. Sabine and Samantha, they are my blood… but, god, you’re my family, Scully. My fam-ily.” 

His voice cracks, and she’s weeping openly with relief. His fingers clasp behind her neck and he draws her towards him, raining kisses and murmuring gratitude in her hair as flickering lights illuminate the dark around them.

7\. Tomorrow is the dawn of the new millennium, no matter what Scully and the fiscal purists say. Watching Frank Black with his daughter makes him eager to get home to Washington. He's taking Sabine to the Air and Space Museum tomorrow, in what Scully teasingly claims is a boldface attempt to subvert her grounding influence, and what he calls father-daughter bonding and take-your-kid-to-work day. But first, with the threat of the Apocalypse curtailed, he has a little unfinished business to attend to. Six weeks ago he likened calling Scully his touchstone to a wedding vow, but he never got to kiss his bride.

She's watching Dick Clark as he approaches, his lame wing cradled tight against the butterflies in his belly. He's struck anew at how luminous she is, even under hospital fluorescents. He asks so much from her, and she demands so little in return. With Sabine's presence in their lives slowly becoming more normal, it's time to start clearing his debt. It's the work of many lifetimes, and he looks forward to never finishing.

As the apple drops, he leans into her, parting his mouth just enough to brush the sensitive flange of his inner lip against her. He feels the shocked intake of her breath against his cheek and certainty settles over him like a wool blanket. He's going to make this work, for all three of them.


End file.
